Six years ago, the New York Times appended a correction to its obituary of George Michael, the sportscaster who pushed those big buttons on The Sports Machine, saying the original piece had “omitted three survivors.” The paper blamed the error on “information provided by a family member.”

It’s obvious where this begins: Thirteen years ago, at baseball’s annual winter meetings, the entire story was Alex Rodriguez and when and where he would be going. The Texas Rangers, who’d averaged 90 losses in three seasons with Rodriguez at shortstop, had made clear that they wanted out from under the seven years…

Yesterday, we lost Muhammad Ali, the Greatest of All Time. Note the absence of a noun in that title. He was not the Greatest Boxer of All Time; he was not the Greatest Athlete of All Time; he was not the Greatest Showman of All Time. No, Greatest stood alone, floating, butterfly-like, unencumbered by a noun or any…

What even was John Kasich’s sweaty, affronted, whatever-happened-to-the-responsible-grownups-in-this-party act if not an even more insulting and ahistorical version of “Make America Great Again”? When was the last time the Republican Party had responsible grownups? When it sold a needless, catastrophic war in Iraq on…

Ted Cruz, the worst possible man, lost the Indiana Republican primary to Donald Trump yesterday. He’d staked it as his last stand in the nominating race, even brokering a cynical armistice with John Kasich to unify anybody-but-Trump voters in the state, and got clobbered anyway, by some 17 percentage points. His…

It would be impossible to even approach summing up the totality of Johan Cruyff’s unparalleled influence and contributions to the game of soccer in one blog post. First as the best player on the planet suiting up for Ajax, Barcelona, and the Dutch national team in the 1960s and 1970s, and later as a manager for those…

People die every day; famous people die over the course of many days. Those left behind watch as the internet floods with earnest RIPs and dewy-eyed takes and angry ripostes toward anyone with the gall to joke or critique At a Time Like This. In some instances, some otherwise empathetic people cut straight to…

Hear me, O Americans. If lots of people want to give you lots and lots of money to go stand on stages and just kinda sleepily free-associate whatever pops into your mind in response to prompts from strangers, and want to treat you like a rock star for doing it, and will support you in this behavior for like nine…

Jeb Bush finally—fucking finally—dropped out of the Republican primary campaign over the weekend, by my reckoning at least a few months later than observable reality said he should. Nobody wanted him to be president. Possibly he himself did not really want to be president, so much as he wanted not to be the Bush who…

If Carly Fiorina’s life were a television series, last Wednesday’s season finale would have occasioned a lot of groaning about lazy formulas. Really? Another season ending with Carly an utter abject failure, and the people who worked for her unemployed? For chrissakes, House was more unpredictable than this.

Once upon a time, Rick Santorum was an ambitious young legislator whose considerable oratorical skills and policy fluency existed in unsteady balance with social views that make St. Paul look like Aleister Crowley. Now he is a slang term for the frothy mix of lube and shit that sometimes is a byproduct of anal sex,…

Driving south on Interstate 95 through Maryland, eventually you come to the I-495 interchange near College Park. If you stay on I-95, then for the next little while, you also are on I-495, the Capital Beltway; the routes are concurrent, sharing the same physical road. Farther along, in Springfield, Va., the two routes…

Generic man Martin O’Malley ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last night. The Iowa caucus was rough on the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor: Once poll-workers sorted out the caucus-goers who thought they were standing in line to get their photo taken with “that guy from, uh,…